Humans were very surprised when they discovered that a sophisticated alien race had been hiding out in the region of Vega for so many centuries prior to their discovery in 2301, because, by then, many probes had been sent in that direction, each revealing uninhabitable worlds. The earliest efforts to explore the star system had taken place prior to the colonization of TRAPPIST-1 when Earth was looking for life-supporting exoplanets during Project Daedalus. The reason why the Ch’k li’ak chose to hide themselves for so long after Earth devised superluminal travel long perplexed diplomats and historians alike, but has since been explained as a peculiar quirk of their fascinating culture—you have to prove yourself as a hive-friend first.
The Ch’k li’ak are beautiful insectoid aliens with largely humanoid forms. They have three distinct forms—broodlings, drones, and adult—and in all of them, they walk upright with two arms and two legs, much like humans.
In their broodling form, from birth to about 15 years of age, they are small, rounded and have clear insectoid features with compound eyes and hard exoskeletons with a soft outer shell upon their backs. In this early form, they are incapable of forming speech in human terms and communicate simply in a series of clicks, pops, and chirps. This language forms the fundamentals of all Ch’k li’ak communication, and as they mature they master an increasingly complex and rich language.
In their drone form, from 15 to around 35 years of life, they are much taller and thinner, averaging around 160 centimeters in height, and look somewhat like golden praying mantids, albeit significantly less elongated. They also grow prehensile antennae, which act as proprioceptive sensory organs, and their speech, while vocalized much the same way as broodlings, becomes much more complex and subtle.
In both of these first two phases, they have no gender nor biological sex, and when speaking human languages, special pronouns are used when referring to them: xe, xer (or sometimes xem), xemself, etc. These pronouns have been subsequently adopted by non-binary human individuals on Earth.
Sometime in their fourth decade, they enter a chrysalis and evolve into an even more beautiful, iridescent form, possessing vestigial wings, humanoid eyes and compound retinas instead of compound eyes. They retain their antennae, and also develop more sophisticated mouthparts for speaking with vocalized, palatal, and fricative sounds.
In this more evolved adult form, they are called Dzin, and they can be either male or female. Many, though not all of these Dzin will, with another Dzin of the opposite sex, breed a brood of drones that remain under their command. These drones work for the Dzin to help them earn intellectual and knowledge privileges.
Ch’k li’ak are mostly driven by intellectual pursuits and an insatiable curiosity. Thus, they have amassed great quantities of data about other planets and their inhabitants. Instead of collecting pollen for making honey like honeybees, they collect information, which is then stored scrupulously and bureaucratically within the Mind-Hive. They are occasionally rather aloof and can sometimes be officious, though personality traits among them are at least as varied as among humans. Art, music, stories, and poetry are also very important to many of them, and collecting such art treasures from other cultures is often an important pursuit. They largely favor the performing arts rather than plastic arts.
Dzin may be ranked or unranked, and a considerable amount of activity among them is dedicated to gaining and rising in rank within their society, which they gain by adding information to the Mind-Hive. Their rank is signified by their number, and as this number rises, they become closer to becoming the next Grand Dzin, the highest-ranking executive authority on their world. Well-connected drones may be assigned a rank as soon as they mature into Dzin. Whether ranked or not, Dzin tend to remain on their home planet and act as the elder statesmen, scientists, artists, and leaders. However, some lead expeditions to other worlds or serve as linguistics experts or diplomats.
Every ten years, one Dzin is chosen to be the leader (Grand Dzin) of the whole species, functioning as the ultimate arbiter of Ch’k li’ak activity. This choice is made mostly based on who had collected the most knowledge over the previous ten years (or whoever has accumulated the most in total), but the appointment must still be approved by the other Dzin who act as a congress of sorts in order to mitigate executive power. This Grand Dzin is akin to a president or other limited executive authority. The Grand Dzin may be either male or female, and their mate becomes an honorary and ceremonial political force as well.
Ch’k li’ak are typically very cautious about entering into involvement with the affairs of other systems and species. (They have the capacity to camouflage their planets from most other species—a technique they guard most zealously.) Most decisions made are subject to great debate and decorum before being finalized. Thus, they move slowly and methodically. They are slow to befriend other races, waiting for exceptionally long periods to determine whether they are valid potential allies. This is somewhat mitigated by the executive authority of the Grand Dzin, who possesses some emergency powers to be used in a crisis. Indeed, in the wake of the Gorathkai attacks on Earth, it was the intervention of the Grand Dzin, Zhr’kin II, that moved the Ch’k li’ak to ally with Earth. The Ch’k li’ak artistic community fought for this intervention, eager to have access to an entire world’s body of work.
Once allied with a Hive-friend race, however, they are fiercely loyal and will fight to the death to preserve a member of that society, just as they would for their own kind. On the other hand, because of their obsessive need to collect information, most of their lives paradoxically tend to be lived in a rather transactional manner, and humans often find the dichotomy perplexing. Insightful humans will note, however, that the dividing line tends to be matters of personal health, well-being, or live-or-death situations. If one is healthy and well-cared for, then relationships tend to be largely transactional in nature, but if misfortune strikes one of their own, Ch’k li’ak become strikingly compassionate in their efforts to help. In fact, they consider helping other ethical and friendly species to be intrinsic to their moral code. Though the precise reasons for this are unclear, human sociologists have speculated that since they evolved from a highly communal, hive-minded insectoid species, the communal mindset was expanded to include other friendly species as they evolved higher cognitive function.
There are essentially four Ch’k li’ak languages: Kz’lzt (broodling speech), !Ňmur (drone speech), and !K’zich (Dzin speech, i.e. “from the cocoon”). Kz’lzt is a simple language composed of clicks (‘), pops (!), and trills (~), because Ch’k li’ak children and drones can only make mandibular sounds. !Ňmur adds a droning hum sound (ň), which has three versions, and the clicks, pops, and trills gain sophistication and nuance which expands each of them to four distinctly different sounds. When the Ch’k li’ak emerge from their cocoons (the K’zich) and become full adults, these basic sounds are integrated into their speech, but voiced, voiceless, palatal sounds, fricatives, and plosives are added, including all the sounds made in human speech, plus eight others. Of these sounds, they only struggle mildly with fricatives, which they simulate mainly using their mandibular sounds.
Thus, the Ch’k li’ak alphabet is composed of 34 distinct letters, plus 15 symbols representing Kz’lzt, which are based on pollen-gathering dance patterns. These letters and symbols have been only partially transliterated due to the limitations of the human languages in accommodating all of the sounds. It should also be noted that this written system is distinct from the superluminal navigation semasiographic language, Astivian, which is primarily intended to represent binary numbers.
!K’zich is separated into two forms: High and Low Dzin. Low Dzin is used by unranked Dzin, and this is a fully developed and highly sophisticated language on its own. The core of High Dzin speech is identical to Low Dzin, but many words, phrases, formal greetings and etiquette, and ritualistic and poetic speech are added to be used by the members of the Ch’k li’ak Congress. Though unranked Dzin are functionally capable of using the High Dzin speech, protocol forbids it. Doing so would not be illegal but would be considered highly uncouth.
Though broodlings and drones cannot speak human languages at all, Dzin are perfectly capable of doing so with no accent, though they tend to speak in a higher register than most humans and add linguistic flourishes like thoughtful hums and drones for emphasis.
The reverse cannot be said of humans. The Ch’k li’ak languages are notoriously difficult for humans to master, simply because the dry clicks, pops, and hums, and all their nuances are largely incompatible with wet human mouths. This means that many humans tend to leave those sounds out and stick with what little they can pronounce, which often creates hilarious misnomers and mondegreens. Some humans have mastered the basic Ch’k li’ak clicks, pops, and trills, enabling them to speak broodling speech, and this is something Ch’k li’ak Dzin often find humorous or charming because it is as though these humans are engaging in ‘baby talk.’
The name of their planet—Ck!k’nith’lyr—like most Ch’k li’ak words is almost unpronounceable, as it involves a mixture of chitters and clicking combined with palatal sounds. The closest approximation is, usually pronounced “Chick-ka-nith-leer” by humans, though there are pops and clicks in between syllables. It literally means “hive of the Ch’k li’ak” in their language—a word with connotations of simply “home.” Their world is almost twice the mass of Earth, and, thus, the gravity is considered uncomfortable for humans, who prefer not to visit without some kind of GFG assistance. The planet is hot and dry near the equator but possesses lush garden-like temperate zones and humid tropical locations near the poles, which is where most of their cities are located. Only the extreme poles are cold. Thus, Ch’k li’ak do not like cold much and wear special silver suits that provide heat when traveling outside their world. (Otherwise, they can be provoked by extreme cold into a hibernation-like torpor which is totally incapacitating.) The planet has one massive continent and several smaller ones. The main continent is characterized by a reddish-brown stripe across its center, which is a large desert region. Ch’k li’ak prefer cities which are blended into the natural surroundings and therefore their cities are not usually visible from orbit.
The home planet has nine moons, the largest of which was originally a dead moon much like that of Earth but whose silicon sands have been slowly converted over millennia to a massive data storage system that is called the Mind-Hive Datacore. As of the current date, almost the entire moon surface is one gigantic storage database which contains the entirety of all Ch’k li’ak knowledge. It contains something in the range 6 million exa-qbytes of data, the largest known repository of knowledge in existence. The remainder forms parts of the Ch’k li’ak industry, which has been moved off the home planet. This enormous database contains everything from advanced technological information—some of which the Ch’k li’ak themselves cannot decipher—as well as more mundane information, such as the history of lost civilizations or ancient art or musical forms. Such information is a major part of Ch’k li’ak political activities, and the various Dzin often jockey for political positions based on the value of the information that they contribute. Mind-Hive curation is considered one of the most desirable of all Ch’k li’ak occupations, and the wait list for curatorship is exceedingly long, and the curators themselves are treated almost as priests.
Ch’k li’ak possess all the advanced technology necessary for space travel, including a form of faster-than-light travel technology similar to the Bardolian Superluminal Drive of humans. They do not have any psionic abilities. Their insectoid brains are so different from that of humanoids that they are also practically immune to telepathy. Only the most experienced of telepaths may squeeze information from their minds with great effort, and none can control them with telepathic suggestions at all. They do not possess matter transmission technology.
The Ch’k li’ak developed a means of navigation through wormholes which was determined to be superior to other means. This involves the use of their semasiographic number system, which humans call Astivian (details in a future blog). This symbolic language, which evolved millennia ago as a means of signifying rank within the hive hierarchy, involves the use of a unique symbol for each number, which must be intuitively recognized by navigators while traveling through wormholes. This process produces a semi-prescient state of consciousness within the navigators that allows for an immediate reaction to hazards in wormhole navigation. (In effect, the navigators are seeing a few seconds into the future.) The best navigators are masters of this symbolic language, and the symbols have been adopted by humans in various capacities over the prior three or four centuries. Thus, they often appear in other applications used by Earthlings and the Ch’k li’ak.
They first encountered Earth people early in the 24th century. After an initially chilly relationship, relations later warmed, resulting in an alliance being formed in 2336 to share knowledge on how to deal with the problem of Gorathkai. Due to the relative proximity of the Lyra system to Earth, as well as their prior relationship, the Ch’k li’ak fought alongside Earth in the various Gorathkai Wars, ultimately providing a refuge for some humans escaping the destruction of the Varda Prime colony on one of their moon whose mass is nearly equal to that of Earth.
Currently, a colony of refugees from Varda Prime resides upon this moon, which the Earthlings call Arcadia II, is distinguished by a Phillips Halo surrounding its upper third, in which thousands of Earthlings currently reside. The moon’s surface is also mostly habitable and relatively temperate, though the atmosphere is too thin for the likes of humans. These human residents are in the process of sharing their terraforming expertise in exchange for their residency within the Ch’k li’ak system, and they are demonstrating this knowledge upon the moon Arcadia II with Ch’k li’ak permission.
The Ch’k li’ak mostly feed upon a type of honey. Formerly, this was produced within honey stomachs by the Ch’k li’ak themselves. Eventually, they evolved away from this process and now create food by a means of protein and sugar synthesis. This green honey cannot be safely consumed by humans for any significant period due to several extra proteins which cannot be digested by human enzymes. These proteins eventually build up in human organs and cause severe pain and disorientation, similar to porphyria.
There is much more that could be said about these peaceful and intriguing aliens, and in future blogs I plan on slowly releasing examples of their languages and alphabets. Next up, in part 2 of this series, I will be writing about two other alien species: the Luojai and the Cithleeri.
When Morpheus Overslept is available now at Amazon in both paperback and Kindle, as well as in Barnes & Noble ebook (NookBook).
Yours in print,
—Michael